Prefigurative Planning: Enacting utopias in the here and now

The spiralling crises of climate breakdown, growing inequalities, democratic deficits and declining public services have created a loss of hope for the future and a creeping pessimism about the ability of planning to be a force for good and to imagine places that do not yet exist. In this talk, I draw on interrelated concepts of prefiguration, the not-yet, hope, and concrete utopia to propose a prefigurative mode of planning defined as a collective process of negating the given, envisioning utopias, and enacting the not-yet future in the here and now. I discuss how a new way of utopian thinking can help us to see the normalised conditions not as how things are, but as how they are made to be and how they might be unmade or remade. In highlighting the differences between prefiguration and traditional utopianism, I suggest that prefigurative planning is not about how to ‘build that city on the hill’, but how not to give up the pursuit of ‘better’ cities by combining criticality with planning imagination.

Speaker Information

Professor Simin Davoudi is Chair of Town Planning and Co-Director of the Centre for Researching Cities at Newcastle University. She is Honorary Member and former President of the Association of European Schools of Planning; Fellow of RTPI; Trustee of TCPA; and Trustee of the Academy of Social Sciences. She has held visiting professorships at universities in the USA (Virginia Tech), Netherlands (Amsterdam & Nijmegen), Sweden (BTH), Australia (RMIT), Finland (Tampere) and Austria (BOKU). Simin has served as expert advisor for the UK government (ODPM Planning Research Network, DCLG Housing Markets, DEFRA Social Science Expert Group); research councils in the UK (ESRC Strategic Advisory Network) and Europe; several planning schools in the UK and internationally; and large international research programmes. She has undertaken over 35 research projects funded by international, European and UK funding bodies and has over 200 academic publications including the 16th. edition of Town and Country Planning in the UK (2024, Routledge).